Detailed map of Texas, published just after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War.

Mexico never accepted Texan independence (1836), and was outraged at the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1845. This combined with American grievances against Mexico led to the war, which began in 1846, the year this map was first issued by S. Augustus Mitchell.

The map shows all of Texas, with the northern tip in an inset in the lower left corner. The map depicts topographical information with clear precision, including towns, rivers, roads, and the site of the Battle of San Jacinto (1836). The map shows a number of oversized Texas counties. Examples of these large early counties include Robertson and Milam, extending from central Texas northwestward to the Red River; San Patricio, extending from the Nueces to the Rio Grande; and Bexar, comprising not only the present county of that name but lands to the southwest and west along the Rio Grande and northwards into the present panhandle.

All important sites from the Texas Revolution appear. There are many early settlements and towns not often shown on early maps, such as Orozimbo, Bolivar, Quintana, and Liverpool in Brazoria County, as well as De Kalb, Boston, Daingerfield, Smithland, Pulaski, Teran, Belgrade, Salem, Zavala, and Aurora in far east Texas, to mention only a few. The map denotes Comanche and Apache lands and also repeats the Le Grand description of fertile, well-wooded lands in the Llano Estacado noted on Arrowsmith's map of 1841.

The inset at lower left shows northern Texas extending to Santa Fe and into present Colorado. A note in the northwest part of that county states:

This tract of Country as far as North Canadian Fork was explored by Le Grand in 1833, it is naturally fertile, well wooded, and with a fair proportion of water.

Also of note are the early roads shown in the state as well as indications of the locations of Indian tribes.

The map was originally engraved by C.S. Williams and was included in the last edition of Tanner's Universal Atlas in 1845. Following his acquisition of the work in 1846, Samuel Augustus Mitchell kept the map relatively unchanged from 1846 to 1849, when he sold the rights to the atlas to Thomas Cowperthwait & Company. Cowperthwait re-issued the map in a different format shortly thereafter, but the very scarce true first edition of the 1850 edition of the Atlas includes the C.S. Williams plate, although the copyright has been changed.

A decorative guilloche-pattern border typical of maps published by Tanner, Mitchell, and Thomas, Cowperthwait & Co. surrounds the entire composition.